THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2013
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ambitions. She plans to go to mortuary
school, and covers her failures with bit-
ter self-defense: "Anyone can be a suc-
cess....It's so much more interesting to
not want that."
There is a local figure, famous for
carrying a long pole over his shoulder,
painted with barber stripes. Giddle tells
Reno, "It's his thing, that pole. No sell-
able works, just disruption. Goes to gal-
lery openings, bonks people on the head
by accident." There is Stanley Kastle,
of whose art Sandro has this to say to
Reno: "All Stanley had to do, at this
point, to keep his art career going, was
order neon tubes in various colors from
a manufacturer, and his assistants ar-
ranged the tubes according to an algo-
rithm he'd invented long ago, as if to
subtract himself from the production of
his own art." When not organizing this
operation, Stanley records monologues
on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Kushner
reproduces one of these recordings, over
four and a half long pages; it's meander-
ing, pretentious, oddly likable, banal.
Even Stanley concedes that he doesn't
make a lot of sense, and that the main
problem may just be that "men over fifty
can't stop talking."
The novel's greatest talker is Sandro's
best friend, Ronnie Fontaine, whose
photographs (such as we hear about
them) seem nugatory, but whose stories
are captivating. Ronnie once made a
"blithe declaration" that he wanted to
"photograph every living person. San-
dro said it was Ronnie's best work and
something on the level of a poem: a
gesture with no possible rebuttal. It
didn't matter that it was never made."
But perhaps his stories are his best
works. We soon understand that noth-
ing Ronnie says can be trusted. Yet he
has all of Kushner's uncanny novelistic
confidence. He has probably never been
in prison, for instance (it emerges that
he has channelled the experience of his
criminal brother), but, when he talks
about his time inside, you believe in it:
I know about con nement and boredom
and midnight re drills. Ampli ed orders
banging around the prison yard like the eve-
ning prayer call from the mosques along At-
lantic Avenue. I know pimento loaf. Pow-
dered eggs. Riots. The experience of being
hosed down with bleach and disinfectant like
a garbage can. I know about an erotics of
necessity.
Notice how Kushner gently tweaks
the tail of that tale, and makes the
slightly Sontagian proclamation sound,
in Ronnie's telling, authentically silly:
"I know about an erotics of necessity."
Kushner has become a sharp comic
writer (her new novel is much funnier
than her first), and has had the advan-
tage of having spent several years watch-
ing the contemporary Manhattan liter-
ary and art scene, as an editor at Grand
Street and Bomb. She is funny not at the
expense of contemporary art but at the
expense of the people who make that
art, seeing with clear eyes their bluster
and pantomime. She scours her chosen
period for its extravagance and histrion-
ics; the parallel with today's ambition
market is obvious. Small worlds resem-
ble each other first.
Kushner is also a diligent historical
novelist, which involves seeing differ-
ences. In "The Flamethrowers," she fo-
cusses on the highly politicized world of
post-Nixon nineteen-seventies Amer-
ica. One of her characters is the some-
what sinister Burdmoore Model, ap-
parently a terrible artist (he talks about
art "parting her labia"), better known as
the leader of a radical group called the
Motherfuckers, who went quickly from
anarchism to violence in the late sixties,
and ended up stabbing a landlord. Reno
asks Model why his group was called
the Motherfuckers, and receives this
reply: "Because we hated women. ...You
think I'm joking. Women had no place
in the movement unless they wanted to
cook us a meal or clean the floor or strip
down. There are people who've tried to
renovate our ideas, claim we weren't
chauvinists. Don't believe it. We had
some heavy shit to work out. But we
were idealists, too. We saw a future of
people singing and dancing, making
love and masturbating in the streets."
The scene that Reno moves through is
more casually sexist than Model's outright
misogyny. The chauvinism seems bound
up with the arrogance and attitudinizing,
the sheer performative relentlessness of
the men (and occasional women) who
pass in and out of Reno's life. Sandro tells
Reno, "Sex is not about exchange val-
ues. ...It's a gift economy." But Reno
seems to be doing most of the gifting,
and, when the time comes and another
woman makes herself available, Sandro
will throw Reno over with practiced ease.
"The Flamethrowers" can be seen as
a contemporary rewriting of Flau-
bert's novel of 1869, "Sentimental Edu-
cation." Reno, like Frédéric Moreau, is
a frustratingly malleable figure, a hero
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